Theodor W. Adorno - Thought Quotes

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The thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general.... Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.

Theodor W. Adorno
If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence. … It is incumbent upon philosophy … to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

Theodor W. Adorno
In both positivism and Heidegger—at least in his later work—speculation is the target of attack. In both cases the thought that autonomously raises itself above the facts through interpreting them and that cannot be reclaimed by them without leaving a surplus is condemned for being empty and vain concept-mongering.

Theodor W. Adorno
Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

Theodor W. Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Theodor W. Adorno
We cannot think any true thought unless we want the true. Thinking is itself an aspect of practice.

Theodor W. Adorno
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

Theodor W. Adorno
It suffices to remember how many sorrows he is spared who no longer thinks too many thoughts, how much more "in accordance with reality" a person behaves when he affirms that the real is the right, how much more capacity to use the machinery falls to the person who integrates himself with it uncomplainingly.

Theodor W. Adorno
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

Theodor W. Adorno
The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

Theodor W. Adorno
What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

Theodor W. Adorno
As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers

Theodor W. Adorno
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

Theodor W. Adorno
The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

Theodor W. Adorno